Content Based Analysis of Email Databases Using Self-Organizing Maps

In this paper we present an approach to organize and classify e-mails using self-organizing maps. The aim is on the one hand to provide an intuitive visual profile of the considered mailing lists and on the other hand to offer an intuitive navigation tool, were similar e-mails are located close to each other, so that the user can scan easily for e-mails similar in content. Furthermore, each group of emails is labelled by a characteristic keyword. To be able to evaluate this approach we have developed a prototypical software tool that imports messages from a mailing list and arranges/groups these e-mails based on a similarity measure. The tool combines conventional keyword search methods with a visualization of the considered e-mail collection. The prototype was developed based on growing self-organizing maps, which solves some problems of conventional self-organizing maps.